The Russians are such fucking whiners. They've been importing weapons from several countries and using them in Ukraine for two years but when Ukraine does it then suddenly it's a big fucking problem.
It's like your brother punching you several times an hour for two years straight and when you finally slug them back they lose their shit and start threatening to cave your skull in with a bat.
Fuck 'em. If they didn't want the smoke they should have stayed home.
Hm... I actually think Ukraine is probably at the forefront of UAV development worldwide at this point (both mass scale domestic production and innovation in design / tactics).
At the beginning of the war they were using bayraktars and commercial quadcopters, and maybe a handful of officially-military-designed western drones. Obviously they drew on established technology, but I actually think at this point developing a completely new generation of UAVs is exactly what they've done (primarily in the aspect of how to keep them tactically effective while making them small and cheap so they can be produced at scale at a limited tech-tier, which isn't something the Western manufacturers really specialize in.)
I think the vital stuff they're importing is tons of artillery rounds and cruise missiles, stuff where you can't really cheap it out in the same way, but if the Kremlin starts getting hit with ATACMS munitions I don't think it's gonna fly to say "naw we found it refurbished bro, nothing to do with the West." IDK, give it time, maybe by a couple years from now they're gonna find themselves at the forefront of production of glide bombs that can reach hundreds of km after building on their exhaustive experience making FPV drones.
They're for sure getting parts and supplies for uav from the west, but they already had uav production in the beginning of the war. Most of their UAV are just commercial products assembled to carry more weight.
You'd be surprised how modular uav are nowadays. You really just need to hook motors up to a control board and your half way there. The stuff that west is probably helping with is hardening them to electronic warfare defenses like broadcast jammers.
The complexity lies in motors, sensors and actuators and especially the software to tie it all together. I'm pretty sure they got help in all of those areas. Which is not in any way meant to minimise their own achievements.
Or just attack Russia regardless of them claiming you're not allowed to?
America isn't pushing the button, they're just doing the usual thing of selling weapons.
It's Russia's fault they're in this thing. They went full border war using their own citizens - when under Pax Americana you're only supposed to do proxy wars in places not near you.
Russia has been doing that in Africa, their mistake has been doing it with their own guys on their own border.
Poland is in the middle of dire distress and instances of extreme danger to life or property. Also, Indonesia (a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania) borders Ukraine.
"Assembled in the USA" means, we put a sticker on the bottom of the product that we unpacked from a shipping container and placed in retail packaging. The sticker only said "Assembled in the USA."
I used to work for a company that did something like this. We had a product that was built overseas, and a major customer wanted one but would only buy it if it was made in America. So we had it built overseas, taken apart, shipped to the factory I worked at, the overseas assemblers flew here, they put it back together, and slapped a made in America sticker on it.